I’m referring to @eviltrout’s tagging plugin, which I believe is intended to be included with discourse. Really looking forward to its official release.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/early-preview-of-the-new-tagging-plugin/23713?u=tobiaseigen
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We are looking to use Discourse for multiple groups. We’d love to make a top level category for each group and then be able to support up to three sub-levels below that. Is there an option for going more than two levels deep? Is there an alternative to nesting sub-categories to achieve what we need?
For example: IT might be a top level, with a sub for the day-time team, and another sub for the night team. Under each sub there might be procedures as a sub-sub, contact lists as a sub-sub, etc.
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When we switched over we went from a 3-level structure to a 2-level structure. Making the change was a lot less work than expected. In most cases where we had a third level, we found it really wasn’t needed…
If I was running your forum, I’d combine the “Day team” and “Night team” boards and just use a tag to indicate which applied to each team.
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I agree with @strager a basic high level category strategy mixed with tags. Just remember that permissions are always category based in Discourse!
We’re bumping up against the depth limit too. Tags are not a suitable replacement.
Here’s the specific example:
Our discourse is for the members of a makerspace. The Space category is for everything related to the physical infrastructure, tools and rules (as opposed to the members, their projects, off-topic conversations etc.)
Under Space, we have Tools, Rules, Infrastructure, Storage etc.
I’m now finding the Tools category to be rather cluttered and would like to make Woodworking, Electronics, Rapid Prototyping etc. sub-categories. But because Tools lives in Space, I can’t.
Tags are not a suitable replacement, because they are cross-category. Our users will happily apply the “woodworking” tag to topics about their projects, or general discussion topics. There’s no simple and obvious way to say “just show me the Woodworking (tag) Tools (category)”
They’re also optional, which IME means chasing around after everyone adding tags.
I was wondering why the hard limit of 2 levels was chosen? I can understand it as a default limit, but don’t see the harm in allowing administrators to choose a setting that works best for their site.
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I think a better solution here is allowing restrictions on tags, it’s a very simple change, allowing deeper categories has a very large amount of UX implications, and would require a fair amount of backend refactoring
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But there is. Just go to tools and then select woodworking from the tags pulldown. It will show only woodworking topics from the tools category.
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After enabling the site setting show filter by tag
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Aaaah - HA!
And I’ll say it again to make it >20 characters.
Aaaah - HA!
(still not great though, because tags span categories and therefore appear in the dropdown in categories that contain no instances of that tag)
After a quick test, this only makes things more confusing 
- still not a substitute for a proper tree structure.
This would be a good improvement. However the SQL must be crafted carefully because this can get slow easily.